The youngest son of a Russian Orthodox priest who was also professor of Russian literature at Moscow University, Pobedonostsev was educated at home and at the Oldenburg School of Law in St. Petersburg, from 1841 to 1846. His adult life was devoted to service at the centre of the Russian state bureaucracy, beginning in the Moscow office of the senate. The publications he produced in his spare time there on the history of Russian civil law and institutions led to his being invited in 1859 also to lecture on civil law in Moscow University. His courses were so distinguished in organization, learning, and clarity that in 1861 Alexander II asked him to serve also as a tutor to his sons during the time they spent in Moscow each year. At the same time, he was an important contributor to the 1864 reform of the Russian judicial system. In 1865 he accepted the tsar’s invitation to leave Moscow University and the senate to serve as a tutor to the tsar’s sons and their families in St. Petersburg. Gradually he turned against all the reforms of Alexander II, particularly that of the courts. His service as one of the tutors and closest advisers of Alexander III helped make the latter a most reactionary ruler. Pobedonostsev was appointed to the senate in 1868, to the council of state (a high advisory body) in 1872, and in 1880 to the director generalship, or chief administrative position, of the Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, a position he held until the fall of 1905. This post gave him immense power over domestic policy, particularly in matters affecting religion, education, and censorship.

Pobedonostsev considered man to be by nature “weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious.” He denounced the 18th-century Enlightenment view of the perfectibility of man and of society and therefore strongly supported paternalistic and authoritarian government. He looked upon each nation as being based on the land, the family, and the national church, and he regarded the maintenance of stability as the principal purpose of government. He sought, therefore, to defend Russia and the Russian Orthodox church against all rival religious groups, such as the Old Believers, Baptists, Catholics, and Jews. He also defended Russian rule over the various minority groups and supported their Russification. As lay head of the church, he promoted the rapid expansion of primary education in parish schools because he saw it, with its emphasis upon religion, as a strong bulwark of the autocracy. He sought to keep each person in that station in life into which he had been born and to restrict higher education to the upper classes and exceptionally talented. He tried also to prohibit and to banish all foreign influences, especially western European ideas concerning constitutional and democratic government. He was thus largely responsible for the government’s repressive policies toward religious and ethnic minorities and toward Western-oriented liberal intellectuals.

Pobedonostsev had great influence in 1881, immediately after the assassination of Alexander II, when he persuaded Alexander III to reject the so-called Loris-Melikov constitution that was designed to bridge the gap between the government and the leading elements of society. He influenced the government’s reactionary domestic policies throughout the rest of the 1880s but exercised little authority during the last 15 years of his life. His role, however, was exaggerated during his lifetime by critics of the regime and since then by historians, largely because his personality, appearance, and known views superbly qualified him as the symbol of a system of government deeply unpopular among many educated Russians and among all liberals and radicals.

Pobedonostsev was a dry, reserved, and deeply pessimistic ascetic with almost no close friends, except for the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who died in 1881. At the same time, he was a man of immense learning and scholarship who was widely respected among foreign diplomats. He read and spoke most European languages and was deeply familiar with the great body of European and American literature and philosophy—although he strongly supported censorship and tight controls for other Russians. Especially after 1890 he was convinced the regime would be overthrown by revolution. His hatred and fear of constitutional and democratic government, freedom of the press, religious freedom, trial by jury, and free secular education was best expressed in a collection of essays, Moskovskyy sbornik, published in 1896.

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